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A review by tbr_the_unconquered
Devil Dragon by Deborah Sheldon
3.0
The movies which hit a real high for me as a kid almost always had large animals running amok in them and these included Jurassic Park and it’s sequels, Jaws and Anaconda amongst others. What this has left me with (even in my 30’s) is an unreasonable love for monster flicks and this extends to the books I read as well. Deborah Sheldon’s novel falls totally into this territory where a seemingly extinct giant reptile wreaks havoc in the wilds of Southern Australia.
The story is fairly straightforward : a deskbound scientist – Erin Harris while on vacation comes across a half-eaten carcass of a heifer that she believes could be the handy work of Varanus priscus. This strange name belongs to a giant extinct mega lizard which was the ancestor of today’s Komodo Dragon. Erin is by no way a strong or a likeable person and she is overburdened with an immense inferiority complex and daddy issues. Her mind comes up with a rationale that if she were to find this lizard and present it in front of the world then that would be salvation from her own complexes. A rag tag group of hunters and farmers come together to mount a little expedition into the forest to search for the lizard. As expected, things go utterly wrong and that forms the rest of the story.
There aren’t much by way of details and if you have read a fair number of monster stories and watched Hollywood flicks then none of what happens would surprise you much. The gore element is less and the author focuses more on the central character of Erin and how she comes almost fully undone during the events. Enjoyable !
The story is fairly straightforward : a deskbound scientist – Erin Harris while on vacation comes across a half-eaten carcass of a heifer that she believes could be the handy work of Varanus priscus. This strange name belongs to a giant extinct mega lizard which was the ancestor of today’s Komodo Dragon. Erin is by no way a strong or a likeable person and she is overburdened with an immense inferiority complex and daddy issues. Her mind comes up with a rationale that if she were to find this lizard and present it in front of the world then that would be salvation from her own complexes. A rag tag group of hunters and farmers come together to mount a little expedition into the forest to search for the lizard. As expected, things go utterly wrong and that forms the rest of the story.
There aren’t much by way of details and if you have read a fair number of monster stories and watched Hollywood flicks then none of what happens would surprise you much. The gore element is less and the author focuses more on the central character of Erin and how she comes almost fully undone during the events. Enjoyable !